The workshop introduced potential new growers to elderberries, and shared the details of 360 Farms’ operations. Topics included variety selection, propagation, establishment, production, harvest, marketing, and the many uses for this perennial plant.

Kerr Center President David Redhage also made a presentation, and described the Kerr Center’s own experience with elderberries.

Finding a new niche crop was only the beginning of 360 OK Farms’ innovations. “The berries sell for $2 a pound,” says Brent Madding. “The flowers go for $10 an ounce.”

With that in mind, 360 Farms makes and markets a variety of value-added elderberry products, including teas, soaps, and skin care products. They grow their own ingredients for this product range, using no pesticides.

The Maddings specialize in the research and cultivation of Oklahoma native varietals of elderberry, maintaining an eight-acre elderberry orchard with 7,000 plants. They market retail and wholesale, selling both cuttings and rooted stock of several different varieties.

360 Farms needed a reliable means of both propagating elderberry plants and growing herbs and vegetables year-round in Oklahoma’s unpredictable weather. Their solution shows yet another example of the Maddings’ outside-the-box thinking: an aquaponic greenhouse that gets its fertility from fish rather than commercial fertilizers.

White-nose syndrome has been confirmed for the first time in Oklahoma, making it the 31st state with the deadly disease that affects hibernating bats. Bats play an important ecological role; each bat can eat up to 3,000 insects, including mosquitoes and agricultural pests, in a single night. Biologists are concerned about how white-nose syndrome will affect the bat populations in the future.